This is a collection of 11 Dickens spin off stories, with a murderous or otherwise deathly theme. Two of the stories concern Dickens teaming up with, firstly, Wilkie Collins, then with his son-in-law, Charles Collins, Wilkie's brother. The other nine are all based on Dickens novels, with pairs of stories based on A Christmas Carol, The Pickwick Papers, Great Expectations and A Tale of Two Cities, and a single story based on Oliver Twist. They are a mixed bag, though they mostly show a close knowledge and appreciation of the original classics from which they derive. My favourite was A Long and Constant Courtship, the story of how Mr Jaggers, the lawyer in Great Expectations, secures the acquittal of Molly, Estella's mother, from a murder charge, before he takes her on as his housekeeper as seen in the classic novel. The two stories based on A Tale of Two Cities were also exciting and well written, Death in Dover featuring the future Scarlet Pimpernel as a boy, and A Tale of One City an atmospherically written story of Sydney Carton's precarious life in revolutionary Paris. In A Stake of Holly, a dying Scrooge asks Tim Cratchit to find out who the three ghosts that visited him on the wonderful night of his redemption were in their previous lives. At the opposite end, the ones based on Pickwick Papers were I thought weaker, though I love the classic novel on which they were based; and Fagin's Revenge was a rather silly modern day story about a lost first draft of Oliver Twist being exploited by extremist groups in the Middle East based on the anti-Semitic portrayal of Fagin. ( )

I thought this anthology was a little uneven. A couple of the stories were outstanding, most were okay and at least one just left me cold. Happens with all anthologies in one form or another but there weren't as many that really stood out for me.

Maybe it would have helped if I had read more Dickens but he's never been my favorite (I dislike books that start with the introduction of dozens of characters - I can never keep them straight).

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don't much care for dickensian stories, this one great ( )